Available outside talks

CONSERVATION BIOLOGICAL CONTROL  -  Ecological engineering of agriecosystems for plant diversity; promoting biological control through ingenious insecticide use such as timing and placement.

PROS AND CONS OF GM PLANT RESISTANCE TO INSECTS - Our experience with traditional plant resistance enables us to predict the consequences of GM for human health, problem trading, biological control, breakdown of plant resistance and promotion of tolerance to insecticides.

WHY PHD THESES MAKE ME CRY - Hints for wirting up, based on many years experience as an external examiner at many universities.

WHITE BLACK BEAN APHIDS AND OTHER “TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED” -
Surprise results of experiments on aphids in my lab. at Reading, defying our original hypotheses, have been among the best things that ever happened!

INSECTICIDE APPLICATION TECHNOLOGY - If you’re lucky, for every £1 spent on chemical, 1½ pence will finish on the crop plants!  Is this inevitable, can anything be done about it?  I discuss the importance of droplet size, the contrast between hydraulic and centrrifugal nozzles, how to improve deposition.

ARTIFICIAL DIET FOR APHIDS: Any good?  Any use?  - After the technique is described, the poor aphid performance and the reasons for this are explained. The usefulness of the technique, including for studies on nutrition, toxicology, repellancy, obligate sybionts etc., show that it is quite limited.  More recent discoveries offer some hope for improvements as well as showing unexpected outomes after so many generations of asexual reproduction.

A MATERNAL CHEMICAL CUE AFFECTING THE BEHAVIOUR  OF A PARASITOID OF APHIDS ON  EMERGENCE - The summary of many years work at Reading on the reaction of aphid parasitoids to plant volatiles.